


moth in the flame

by helludic



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Art, Disfigurement, Gen, Illustrated, M/M, Minor Character Death, Origin Story, Questionable Fashion Choices, Satine is a badass adoptive mum, Unhealthy Relationships, Worldbuilding, confidently expressed medical gibberish, general space destruction, lups used to be a goodish egg, medical gore, minor intraspecies xenophobia, now he's a bad bad egg, sad space birb, weakly executed motifs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:29:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22991740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/helludic/pseuds/helludic
Summary: Spectre Solus Lupian had a life before he became the faceless menace terrorising the Terminus. Here it is told in eight interconnected, illustrated instalments. Updates weekly.
Relationships: Original Male Turian Character(s)/Original Male Turian Character(s)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 13





	1. festival of the million lights

Chatti is a bland, monotonous world. Rapid colonisation by settlers from Palaven's Arora region ensured its uniformity, and where the arori dreamed of their homeworld's grand designs, locally available resources came short in recreating their vision. Indeed, the towering spires of their memories are merely honoured through intricately carved designs on plain metal cubicles. These shells are sometimes stacked upon one another and sometimes they stretch on for miles, but each and every single one is almost the same in all of Chatti's cities. The carvings are the sole detail that sets the cubicles apart, the one aspect that cracks through the walls of each shell's inhabitants' repetitive lives.

The citizens of Chatti are merchants and miners, mostly. The odd artist rises to fame with rare strokes of colour amongst the endless greyness of their world. Under the light of Chatti's two suns, life is either stark white or washed out, and the two swirl around each other as the day's hours carry on until the differences become unnoticeable. The nights are long and dark, and they are quiet.

But there is one night once a year when the whole planet stays awake: the Festival of the Million Lights, a long honoured tradition that the first arori settlers brought over with them. Back on Palaven, the festival is a celebration of the emergence of the purpra moths - who mate yearly but whose larvae only emerge in nine years' time -, of the passing of time and the blessing of growth. The purpra moths glow through the darkness in every colour seen by turian eyes. They are a marvellous sight; they light the way to a night of joy and peace shared with loved ones. In absence of these moths, Chatti's festivities are artificially illuminated.

That night is tonight. But here in the city of Harta, families huddle together trying to catch some elusive rest after weeks of their homes being battered by relentless storms. Broken windows screech on their hinges and torn comm lines spark on the muddled pavements below. There is much rebuilding to be done once the storms pass. But the festival lights come alive automatically, and so Harta's slumbering mass glows vibrant in the rain.

Many alleyways slice the lowly rumbling belly of the metropolis. In one such crevice stands a shrouded figure, though one would be hard pressed to spot him amongst the neon blur - at least were it not for the sharpness of his features in the amber glow of an omnitool.

The man is not tall, but he is imposing. With wide set shoulders and a sturdy waist, he is the textbook picture of a chatti miner, almost as if some soul aspiring to the sculptural mastery of the arori chopped him out of a block of stone, but left him unfinished. His plates are grey and unmarked, by either colony paint or age. There are factions of chatti who carve the proof of their belonging into their faces as they do their homes, and yet others who let the passing of time mark their existence. Barefacedness is not an oddity here on Chatti. Not like it is in Hierarchy space.

For one night, the plain and youthful softness of the turian - one sergeant Solus Lupian - sticks out from amongst the coloured lights. He is hunched over his omnitool, his smooth mandibles twitching attentively beneath the rugged garb that shields his head from the storm. He holds at once in his face the nervous excitement of a child and the wary apprehension of an elder, finding himself now in possession of a one way ticket to-- To something else. To change. Though whether for the worse or the better he will not know until he boards that ship.

He hurries out of the alleyway all of a sudden. Determination seems to square his bulky form even further. His heavy boot splatters his omnitool's last reflection - some winged medal? - before he fades into Chatti's grey monotony, small as a speck of dust beneath the festival lights.


	2. shiny things

His mentor is forceful. Lembar is a grizzled old agent; he has no patience for the boy he's been given to prepare. Whether on the field or on their shared ship, Lupian is left feeling as if he cannot catch his breath even in his sleep. So when the old salarian loses his grip on the ledge Lupian doesn't rush to pull him up, and when he is reassigned to a boisterous asari spectre for completion of his training - the final month of probation -, he quietly admits to himself he is relieved.

The ceremony, if one could call it so, is short and to the point. He recites his vows learned by heart in the dark of his first nights as a trainee. A couple fellow agents grip his elbow in acknowledgement. The crowd disperses and he is left wandering the winding streets of the wards. He has taken to wearing a headscarf on their visits to the Citadel ("one day you won't have that pretty young face anymore, and you'll be sorry", his new mentor, Satine, had joked). Truth is, Lupian is not pretty. He is not unpleasant either, but he would not stand out if not for his stark lack of markings. Here in the heart of Council space, his barefacedness sticks out like a sore bruise on milky plates.

He has been saving up his meagre allowance to purchase a scope mod for his shotgun. The weapon is an old model given to him upon his promotion to sergeant in the Chatti military corps - his last grand deed of his old life, as it were. He has stuck with it and it has served him well, and though outdated it is sturdy and reliable. Its polishing proved to be therapeutic during his training. The gun is in splendid condition.

The merchant eyes him up and down and Lupian suppresses a flinch. It would be a lie if he said he is not-- self conscious, perhaps? Of his lack of colony markings. A stupid thing, really; the merchant is human and she should not care, and neither should he.

"Aren't you a little young to be dealing with weapons?" she asks, and she sounds more bored than anything.

Lupian quickly shakes his head in the manner he hopes he's understood correctly to mean a negative reply to the humans. They are still so new on the galactic stage and there is much grief between their peoples. Lupian has no business with the Hierarchy's mistakes.

ID is shown and mods are assessed. In the end he leaves empty handed; he is yet short a thousand creds for the one he likes best.

He carries on wandering the wards. He walks for hours aimlessly and lusts after shiny things in shop windows. He avoids the residential areas and eventually ends up before a gritty looking bar. The establishment seems to vibrate with the bass blaring from within. It makes his plates flare. For lack of anything better to do, he heads in.

He doesn't stay long. A drink is downed and heated looks are exchanged with a mellow faced turian across the dance floor from where Lupian is sat. He doesn't really know what he is doing, but in the haze of it all he ends up tumbling home with the pale plated man, who later he learns is a C-Sec officer. The little apartment is clean and tastefully decorated, if a little bit bare. He tears the man's sheets with his claws in carefully concealed panic and ends up paying him entirely too much for their replacement. He stumbles out sore and tired.

Lupian ends up spending the rest of the night sat by the lake in the Presidium. By the fifth hour he can swear he's caught a glimpse of a fish.


	3. unprepared

The rail guns have been blasting round after round for almost four minutes now - three and fourty-eight seconds, to be precise. With the surveillance system disabled, Lupian has no way of knowing the state of the situation outside the base. No one else was supposed to show up. The mercs certainly haven't spotted him. Though grateful for the distraction, it doesn't sit easily with him that he is effectively trapped in dangerous territory with no clue of what's going on outside.

Just as well, the terminal he's been uploading the spyware to is surprisingly resistant to his efforts. It was supposed to be a simple mission. In and out. Assess the situation. Plant his bugs and leave the little program to feed him information. Return at a later date, once the picture is clear.

The first part of the mission went swimmingly. Well, about as good as it normally does for him. He successfully infiltrated the pirates’ unlawfully claimed territory. There are some peculiar metal trenches, at once sparkling new and frightfully ancient, that run in a radial from the edge of the base’s landing pad area to the main building; he made use of those. There were no cameras or mics or any other more discrete sensors that his trusty little drone could nose out. Lupian, in his youth, is not one to question a rare blessing.

The trenches fork out every couple dozen feet or so. They narrow down, and most end abruptly, overtaken by some monstrous native plant or another, a few by boulders that look suspiciously like the result of explosions. By the time Lupian got to the entrance the drone scouted out, there was only one such side trench within sight distance, more a mossy crany than anything, that led downwards around the corner into what Lupian could only suppose, by the drone’s mapping, to be a bunker. He considered a little detour to check it out, but best to get the mission over with first. His eardrums somehow felt iron hot and itchy anyway - from the layers upon layers of unspecifiable dust, he assumed. How dismaying, that his helmet would need new filters so soon.

And that’s how he got to this place, to this inner chamber with half of its walls caving in, crumbling metal panels looming over his head. The stench out in the trenches - something burnt yet green, humid - is lesser here, but present still. In any case, he didn’t have much trouble hacking into the console.

But true to his usual luck, someone has decided to attempt a hostile takeover precisely as he is carrying out his plan. There is no way his targets won't triple check their equipment after this.

His omnitool beeps to notify him that the upload is complete. With one last careful glance around, Lupian heads towards the exit. He considers taking the trenches again, but the incessant itching inside his skull compels him to attempt an escape through the air vents, out through the back of the building, then run to his shuttle from there as far as his feet can carry him. The sounds of fighting seem to be coming from everywhere now.

It feels like only a moment later that he is scrambling for a makeshift tourniquet aboard his rapidly retreating ship. He keeps the medigel and pain suppressors on hand in several locations around the craft now. He'll stop the bleeding. He'll take those. He'll go to sleep and wake up just long enough before docking with the Citadel to manually maneuver the vessel into port. It's routine, these days.


	4. business as usual

Lupian never did get that scope mod he was lusting after as a fresh faced agent. His trusty shotgun is still part of his armoury, but he's mostly traded its use for various rifles. They don't come cheap and every other part of his life falls into financial disarray every now and again.

It's his fifth year of being a spectre and his work mostly goes like this: the Council will tip him on potential threats they require investigating, of course merely a suggestion, of course unrefusable by virtue of his comparatively short experience; he will go out to wherever he is sent and see through the mission, always successful, and he will limp back to the Citadel to be patched up before being sent out again.

Sometimes he is hurt badly enough to require a week of respite, for recovery. Sometimes it makes him look forward to being shot up and blown off cliff sides. That one always makes him picture Lembar's face; he doesn't know how he feels about it.

On this particular little break Satine takes him out to lunch, and they sit face to face discussing Thessia's latest colonisation plans. They have kept in touch all these years, trading short updates and inside jokes whenever in safe range of a comm buoy. She takes him along on missions sometimes, as well, and those he can do several back to back, without returning to have pieces of himself glued back onto his body.

She's stopped taking shots at his customary headscarf, and mostly tuts along affectionately. Moreover, she even gifted him one the year previous, a silky and durable thing for the Festival embroidered with little golden moths, "to remind you of home". He keeps it for special occasions. He is wearing it today.

Many cups of tea later she takes him back to her cozy flat on the Presidium and pours them stronger drinks. Lupian will need them, what with the marathon of the latest quarian tv sensation that he unwittingly signed up for. Asari, as a rule, are a cunning people, but they are steadfast in their ethics and can be reasoned with. Satine is something else altogether.

Her place is very much a home to him as well. He keeps a key. On the rare occasions they find themselves at the Citadel together she takes him to her bed and strokes his fringe until he falls asleep. He has slept here alone a couple times. But most times he stays with his friend at C-Sec.

Friend, perhaps, is not an appropriate word. Five years on and the two barely know anything about each other. Lupian did not go snooping. But in spite of their feeble acquaintance, he keeps returning to the now detective, always sat in the same spot in that nameless bar where they first met.

The speckled turian is not gentle. He skips formalities and gets straight to the task. He carves his marks into Lupian's meaty waist and thighs and forces his face down into whatever unlucky surface they tumble over, pounding so hard that each thrust rattles the nerves at the bottom of his spine, but it feels good too, good enough to make the whole affair worth it.

Lupian knows this is, maybe, not the way things are meant to go. But he also doesn't know any different, and just like Satine, the detective is a rare familiar port in an ever stormy and incessant sea.


End file.
